Wife interrupted: What makes her stick on when her celeb husband is accused of sex crimes?

Rajendra Pachauri is the latest on Rogues Gallery. The charges of sexual harassment have embarrassed India’s TERI and the UN’s IPCC on whose behalf he grandly collected the Nobel in 2007. But is the deepest blush his wife’s? How does she go about her own work as head of a global, gender-related NGO now that the FIR has detailed the prurient messages with which her besotted husband allegedly bombarded his research analyst young enough to be his granddaughter?

Dr (Ms) Pachauri’s stoic silence is markedly different from Tarun Tejpal’s spirited defence by his wife, Geetan. Whatever the verdict, this case is arguably the trigger that shot down the self-censorship on workplace harassment and worse.

The editor as sexual predator was Indian media’s forcibly kept secret. More rattling skeletons will tumble out till these lionised males learn to keep their paws to themselves. Waving the boss’s dirty underwear in public may no longer jeopardise the victim’s professional survival, but what of the wives? Will they always be the ones having to wash off the smear?

In the 90s, the furious wife of a swashbuckling Indian journo would ring his office and ask to speak to the ‘adulteror, I mean editor’. But more typically, such spouses display a ‘three monkeys’ approach. Their sattvik response is as inexplicable as the unbridled way in which their stud husbands, blinkered by the assumed immunity of power, snort at all norms of professional behaviour, and refuse to rein in their run-amok libidos.

Many of these wives have successful careers. They don’t draw their identity from being Mrs So-and-so. They don’t need his income, and his aura’s tattered anyway. Why then do these women not walk out? Because that would drag them frontally into the scandal? Worse, do they too remain enslaved by the Sati-Savitri syndrome?

Or, more positively, could it be that these women refuse to be ‘humiliated’, that they have armoured themselves with the belief that their husband’s philandering implies no shortfall on their part? They can carry on without any of this affecting their self worth, their careers — even their marriage. Salute them.

***

Alec Smart said: “AAP re AAP, is there no escape from political cult-ure?”

DISCLAIMER : Views expressed above are the author's own.

Comments on this post are closed now

Author

Bachi Karkaria's Erratica and its cheeky sign-off character, Alec Smart, have had a growing league of followers since 1994 when the column began in the Metropolis on Saturday. It now appears on the Edit Page of the Times of India, every Thursday. It takes a sly dig at whatever has inflated political/celebrity egos, and got public knickers in a twist that week. It makes you chuckle, think and marvel at the elasticity of the English language. Bachi Karkaria also writes Giving Gyan in the Mumbai Mirror, and its fellow publications in other cities. It is a shooting-from-the-lip advice column to the lovelorn and otherwise torn, telling them to stop cribbing and start living -- all in her her branded pithy, witty style.

Bachi Karkaria's Erratica and its cheeky sign-off character, Alec Smart, have had a growing league of followers since 1994 when the column began in the Metr. . .